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The  song is blahhhhhhhhhh as fuck (maybe Beggin and pleading makes too critical ).  Videos is hot thoo

[Sovereign.]

This song is so CUNT and this faggot SPEAKING ACK.

m

That's Big Freedia, luv.

[Sovereign.]

But yeah, the video fresh as fuck!

Storm BIH!

[BAPHOMET.]

The New York Times.

Beyonc? in Formation: Entertainer, Activist, Both?

By JON CARAMANICA, WESLEY MORRIS and JENNA WORTHAM
FEBRUARY 6, 2016

On Saturday afternoon, Beyonc? released Formation, her first new song since 2014, on Tidal and YouTube in advance of her Sunday appearance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show at Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. The songs subject is familiar Beyonc? self-affirmation, and the video is among the most politically direct work shes done in her career, with implicit commentary on police brutality, Hurricane Katrina and black financial power. Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, Wesley Morris, The Timess critic at large, and Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, discussed the songs sound, the videos look and the way that Beyonc? increasingly blends the aesthetic and the political. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

JON CARAMANICA: Beyonc? is nothing if not meticulous, and thats clear from the timing of the release of Formation, 24 hours before the Super Bowl, where shes scheduled to share the halftime show with and completely annihilate Coldplay. Beyonc? has a history with the Super Bowl: her 2013 halftime performance at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans was perhaps the greatest of the modern era. And in Formation, she returns to that city; this time, shes in scenes that suggest a fantastical post-Katrina hellscape, but radically rewritten. She straddles a New Orleans police cruiser, which eventually gets submerged (with her atop it). And at the end of the clip, a line of riot-gear-clad police officers surrender, hands raised, to a dancing black child in a hoodie, and the camera then pans over a graffito: Stop Shooting Us. This is high-level, visually striking, Black Lives Matter-era allegory. The halftime show is usually a locus of entertainment, but Beyonc? has just rewritten it overridden it, to be honest as a moment of political ascent.

JENNA WORTHAM: This video feels like the ultimate declaration from Beyonc? that the tinted windows are down, the earrings are off and someones wig might get snatched, judging by the scene in the hair store about 1:22 minutes in. She wants us to know more than ever thats she still grounded, shes paying attention and still a little hood. I think she wants us to know that even though shes headlining a mainstream event like the Super Bowl, she has opinions and isnt afraid to share them, nor is she afraid to do it on a national and global scale. Its easy to think that releasing a video is a soft way to make such a strong statement, but Bey has always been about using striking visuals, clever lyrics and high-impact narratives to express her point of view. As always, a Beyonc? surprise drop operates across multiple vectors, and Formation isnt just about police brutality its about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016, which includes standards of beauty, (dis)empowerment, culture and the shared parts of our history.

WESLEY MORRIS: So it sounds like what you guys are saying is that this video is really, really black. When she says, I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils, its basically my anaconda dont want none unless you got buns, hon but for the face the black, male face. This womans blackness was never in doubt, but I wonder when you become this wealthy and this famous, and when thats not how you were raised friends, say, with the former Paltrow-Martins whether you start to wonder or fear disconnection from what is, in Beyonc?s case, your less affluent, Southern heritage. Her idea of swag in this song is keeping a bottle of hot sauce in her purse. Thats seriously, gloriously specific.

WORTHAM: Wesley, its the blackest of black. Its not Pharrells new black (no shade!) its your grandmothers black. Her idea of swag is keeping hot sauce in her bag while shes decked out in Givenchy. Thats baller, and thats why the world slash Internet is going nuts. Its a dab in a video form, playing on a loop; its phenomenally delicious.

CARAMANICA: Earned all this money but they never take the country out me: Whats fascinating about this song and video is how Beyonc? renders her politics both literally and colloquially. Her radicalism is both overt and implicit she knows that creatively drawn statements of black identity and pride are as powerful as any direct social-political statement. I think youre right, Wesley, in that shes making clear her claims to her old identity even in this new space. But its also important to remember that she was doing similar things all over Beyonc?, the album she surprise released at the end of 2013. Formation feels like a refinement and amplification of that album its sinewy and thrusting, but also angular and tough. Between the song and the video, theres the club, the church, the wig shop, line dancing, donks on parade, black cowboys and, yes, some footage of New Orleans borrowed from a mini-documentary called That B.E.A.T. (which the filmmakers seem alternately frustrated by and pleased with). Beyonc? is both old South and new South her musical and aesthetic approaches posit them as existing on a continuum.

WORTHAM: All great points Jon. This is the exact same strategy she pulled with her last album, and, aesthetically, it feels similar. Her palette, mean mugs and references feel extremely familiar, and it wouldnt be a Beyonc? video if she didnt debut an entirely new and stunning array of looks and dance formations (heh), which of course have already been GIFd and memed to the extreme, but this video feels almost more substantial than the entirety of that album. That album celebrated similar themes capitalism, ignoring haters, black beauty, racial pride and family but it was also about navigating her identity as a mother, and examining her graduation of her relationship from a pair of newlyweds who were drunk in love to raising a precocious child. Some academics and Twitter activists criticized her use of the word feminist as a backdrop during her 2014 VMA performance and highlighted the contrast between a song like Flawless, a triumphant anthem that flaunted her independence, and Partition, where she sings about trying to be hot for her husband.

Personally, I think she can have it both ways: I think she can delight in her sexuality and express uncertainty about what it means as she moves through the seasons of her life, which is how I read that stunning shot of her holding up her middle fingers, her perfectly painted gothic mouth, wrists and neck dripping in pearls and jewels, her face barely visible behind a low-brimmed hat.

But, those were the conversations circling the online water coolers. To me, this feels like a step further, a rebuttal or perhaps an addendum to her thesis statement about who she is and what she stands for, but on her own terms of course, not a tweetstorm. Beyonc?s control is an exquisite study in self-restraint, especially in the current social-media-saturated climate. One could also read this as an existential call to action to her listeners and viewers: Black women, join me and make your own formation, a power structure that doesnt rely on traditional institutions.

Its also not insignificant that shes electing to parade her substantial wealth and ability to outearn most men in the music industry (including her husband, Jay Z) during the Super Bowl the flagship event of male virility and violence in this country. Thats incredibly meaningful. Its a moment where the entire country will be watching, and forced to sit up and pay attention. We cant overlook the audacity of that and I think thats why she is able to command our attention the way she does. Theres nothing else like it, period.

CARAMANICA: Youre right, Jenna, that there were personal depths and complexities on Beyonc? that dont come up here. But in a way, their absence feels pointed after a period where her private life became regular tabloid fodder, shes beyond that sort of public reckoning. You get a quick allusion to her husband, Jay Z, at the beginning of the song, where she sings, Im so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces. Theres the mention of her parents (My daddy Alabama, my mother Louisiana). And of course theres Blue Ivy, her daughter, striking a beautiful pose. But dont get it twisted: Beyonc?, crucially, is the clear source of power here I slay, I slay, I slay, all day. This is more feelin myself than Feelin Myself, more flawless than Flawless. And she upends gender roles easily. Enough of male rappers talking about the things theyll permit women to buy: Formation giddily reduces men to accessories. I might get your song played on the radio station, Beyonc? sings, with a sort of offhanded, gum-snapping tone maybe shell have the time, maybe not and later, she avers, If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper. Finally, toward the end of the song, she executes the flip in realtime: You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making/I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making. I dont know if shes referring to innovations in technology or size of wealth or scale of philanthropy (note the $1.5 million Tidal donated to Black Lives Matter and other groups focused on social justice yesterday) or all of the above, but I know that she already has a line of merch for sale online with some of the songs catchphrases. We can all wear HOT SAUCE caps when we meet up for dinner at Red Lobster next week.

WORTHAM: Ha! So true. Can I also just point out that calling yourself a bama is an ultimate power move, especially if youre from the South? That was the most lethal insult growing up, so I love seeing her twist it here.

MORRIS: While you guys were typing, I decided to treat myself to Beyonc?s Blow, from Beyonc?. Its a masterpiece of lusciousness. Its also just a perfect music video, as at least half of the ones were for that album. Blow has a unified artistic concept (Bey goes rollerskating amid the warmest pinks and purple and browns). Its a blast and suggestively hypnotic. But watching it with Formation in mind, it felt shallow by comparison.

This new video, which Melina Matsoukas directed, is also highly conceptual and a great deal of that concept involves anger and a regional history thats both apparent (the floodwater swallowing her and a police cruiser) and oblique (the caste strata of black New Orleans). The image of Beyonc? in that dress atop the cruiser has some Toni Morrison poetry to it. You dont know whether the shots constitute a baptism or a drowning. Formation is the heaviest thing shes done as a video artist, particularly in the closing shots. I just felt it could have been even stronger and more defiant. The material is all there. But as you astutely mentioned to me earlier, Jon: Beyonc? shrewdly positions herself as a good pop buffer between the countrys bad and ugly.

Oh: And this song is remarkably gay. She takes bounce music which is pretty gay to start with and repeats the word slay in different ways. You guys caught that, too. Slay is an amazing word here, and the choreography seizes on it. Its violent, obviously. But, in a gay context, its also triumphant: He slayed. Im moved by her use of that word, knowing that she knows how to use bounce music to have it work both ways: funereally and as fun. Like Nina Simone and peak Madonna before her (Beyonc? lands somewhere between the two as a polemicist), this is a woman who understands her own power, how to harness and magnetize us to it. I mean, Im supposed to be out at dinner right now. Instead, Im hunched over a computer contemplating the Beyonc? politic. No one running for president at the moment has managed to do that.

woo. Lord.  If I could give this bitch (Bey) a DAP right now now.

The round table discussions to come. 

[Buy The Stars✨]

You gorls are so unrealistic and delusional lol

I mean did u expect people to pay Bey dust?? She JUST came out

n

Both will be slaying the Charts

Rih is still dragging your flop favs

Believe that LMAO!

sssddddd boy u ain't a damn Rih's. I ain't BUYing it

Bsbsbdbdddddddddff

What the heck man

What do I have to do to prove I'm a Nav' gor?

youre in the navy huh ??  .. you play captain and go down with the ship .. we will believe you then hun.

[Marilyn]

I just watched for the second time

SJDHGFSJDCNBVFGDKCMVNHGFREDCMVNBGFDSKDCMNVBFGELD,MCNFBVGREIDMCFNVHGFDVEBWNMSKDJFHYGYEUWIKWMSDNFCBGVFYEUWMDNF VNMFDJWYTEDIFKJDNBQNLWOEIDUFWQP;LW,EMDNFBFNDMWJHEDGFDVSBANJWHEYDFUIWOWLQMWNE DFVGDYSUAIKWMJEHDGFBDWJUQIWOEIRFHBDSVFQWSODFIJVFHGWQOPWEDF

SDKCFVVGS

NXHCGDGCVXA


SHDCGTSGQXCFHGFHDDD


BEY WAEDVWHVDECRBRVQWRTTEQPWEJEGQQQ

[Marilyn]

Why did Rih release that shit last week, of all the time frames sgasvdcv dscwgqhiqwuydgtbqqq

The IDIOCY.

ALL eyes on KING.

[Marilyn]

Perform at the Grammys Bey. Liven that shit.

[Joseph]

So much to like about this

but I don't get lauding capitalism and criticising black oppression together, like one isn't the cause of the other, if not you guys, then someone else... She can't be that rich without other people being that broke.  Last line kinda ruins it.

[Marilyn]

Bey I ju.....I can't.

[Marilyn]

[Herb.]

morn GODilyn

[Marilyn]

Mornin love

"I did not come to play with you hoes, I came to slay bitch"



 

[Herb.]

its at 5 million hits

[LOONA.]

Pissed that the video is unlisted but it's racking up views like crazy.